New on his blog today Pablo Viquez has this post looking at code that will let your Zend Framework applications export to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (via the Spreadsheet Excel Writer PEAR component).

Last week, I had to allow the user to export a given report into an MS Excel file format. The application uses Zend Framework 1.9.1 and so far ZF does not support for "Office" formats, so after searching for a nice implementation, I found a PEAR module called Spreadsheet Excel Writter, which looked pretty good, it had very good documentation and the code was clean and well structured so I wanted I give it a shot.

He lays out the structure of the sample application and, using a context switch on the request, he creates a controller that responds to the "/report" by calling a special model/view combination that uses the PEAR package to push out the custom "report.xls" file.

Vinu Thomas has a new post to his blog looking at using the MS-Excel Stream Handler class to push your data out to Excel (in more than just a CSV file).

If you're looking for an easy way to output your data from a PHP script into a Excel file, you've got to check out this script which I came across at the PHP Classes site. What this script essentially does is to implement a stream handler interface to write Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files.

Code snippets are included showing how to structure the data for the import and how to push that generated Excel file out to the user's waiting client.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a new blog post that looks at creating Excel documents on the fly with the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package.

In one of my projects, we need to send emails to our suppliers with new orders as Excel spreadsheets. We used to do it by hand, but when you have 10 suppliers and you make 200 products orders per week, after some time you are just tired of creating Excel spreadsheets, mailing them and so on. So, my task was to implement automatic spreadsheets creation with PHP.

His example creates a basic file with a set of "Items", some formatting and a set of code/title items to fill out each row. The end result can then be packaged up and sent out as a complete Excel XLS file.

Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Vikram Vaswani has posted a tutorial that shows hos to "break the language barrier" between PHP and Microsoft's Excel to allow for the reading and writing of spreadsheet data directly from one to the other.

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP's pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL result sets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR.

After grabbing the different parts needed (the PHP-ExcelReader package and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package, he shows how to create a simple spreadsheet with just numeric information in it. For something a bit more interesting, he goes the other way and shows spreadsheet data as an HTML table.

Other examples included as well are things like: pushing spreadsheet data into a database, working with formulas and styling it to your liking.

Akash Mehta has pointed out five "PEAR gems" that can help you get your code up and running faster - some helpful bits of code to help you deal with some common issues.

Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it's hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

On the RegDeveloper website, there's a new tutorial posted that covers the creation of both PDF files and Excel reports from inside of PHP (with the help of the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR component and the ClibPDF PHP Library (bundled with PHP 5.3).

Given the prevelance of PHP, Excel and PDF it's fortunate there exists class libraries for the generation of PDF documents and Excel spreadsheets using PHP.

They start with the PDF generation and show the installation process for ClibPDF and an example of creating a document on the fly. Their example sets up a title, some content text and a table of information. Creating the Excel spreadsheet is even simpler with the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer - installation via a PEAR channel and defining the worksheet, fonts and content are quick and easy function calls.

Martynas Jusevicius has pointed out a handy tool to work with Microsoft Excel files in PHP - PHPExcelReader.

There is a nice tool for reading Microsoft Excel files called PHPExcelReader. It works with .xls files up to Excel version 2003, which are based on the BIFF format (later versions use OOXML). It is written in native PHP and does not require any third-party libraries or the MS Office package.

He includes an example of it in use - a loop that runs through the cells of a spreadsheet and outputs each of them (going across the row via an inner for loop as well).

Danne Lundqvist has posted about the process he went through when developing a solution to create Excel files in PHP:

I'm on this project at work where we need to create an excel file and send it via email or ftp to a recipient. The normal answer to this is to create a comma separated file and name it .xls and excel will work it out. However, that only works if you open it directly through an http request and are able to set the http headers correctly.

To get around these limitations, he found two solutions (thanks Google!) in PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and an MS-Excel Stream Handler class. He includes code that gives an example of another solution, one that packs data into a binary string and returns it as a part of the Excel document.

From the JSLabs blog today, there's a quick illustration of how to dynamically create three different types of Microsoft Office files - a Word document, Powerpoint and an Excel file.

There are two main ways to build Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents using PHP. The first is by using the COM library (only if you are using a Windows server) and the other is by using a more standardized approach such as HTML or CSV.

All three examples use the COM method and make basic structures to save out. They also include a screenshot (and description) showing where you can find the list of functions you can call to the COM object for each application.